Beatrix Potter

When I flew to Chicago a week ago the movie Miss Potter was the feature making the trip less of an ordeal. Normally I can't put up with in flight features, can't even navigate the head gear or little speaker volume stuff or channel selecting. But I so wanted to see this film, missing it with surgery and pneumonia in the months when it came out, I got through these things to watch. So like many moments on this trip, I got lucky. And had a long cry too.

When I was very young in my small book collection I had a set of four Beatrix Potter books, very old ones coming from my grandmother, from Philly. I was always told originals and so I see they really are. I appreciate that even more than ever. She gave me several books as a young child that I have always treasured and really she was the one in the family who gave books. I might not have had them otherwise, my mom seemingly free of certain "ideas" like this, or so she states. My Mom perhaps not so maternal. Grandma provided my early love for print with things that show her literary bents, Alice In Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, others...Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Hans Christian Anderson, books that were very old or bound in leather. So Flopsie, Mopsie, Cottontail, Peter, Jeremiah, they were my friends. I evidentially bring things to life from narrative forms, perhaps a bit more vividly than one should tell publicly...and these characters are so vivid ...even 4o years past reading I see them. I could never teach the stories in first grade, in a room filled with literature, never have. I think because they were such apart of my own private retreat. In childhood I was often withdrawn into the happy places of our acre yard, farm, Dad's vast flower growing, the fields, flora and fauna of West Virginia and Madison, Wisconsin where I first read these. I think I have never looked at how I kept these to myself even with my own children. This was brought forward to me watching the film. It presents Beatrix Potter in such a way I realized that there was a kind of kindred connection. We both could make friends with our pets and in those worlds found safety and our friendships and we were both happy there. Genuinely at rest.

The film opens showing her watercolor paints and studio, her life in her late twenties as the one running the practical home of her parents. She has a mom who loves her in a fashion, she has opportunity to pursuit art, drawing, her interests, just no understanding or support in acknowledging this has value. She is unseen for the talent and true gift she is to others.Her Dad does dote on her, but he is absent most of the time. She is invisible to them I think. They rely and even use her up. She is shown at peace with this, willing to operate as a good and patient person, putting others ahead of herself. But she is a truly intelligent, gifted diamond in a very real way unappreciated or under-valued. Or at least being that role for them as they require, she cannot be the artist and the force she has the potentials to be. I think she knows this too. It comes through that she is held unable to fully realize her potentials, self sacrificing. You find yourself hoping that she will be released or seen, hoping someone will make the effort to truly love her, to break through the rules, the times are so restricting and narrow...you find yourself hoping for her liberation through love perhaps. Or wanting that for her.
Her Mom is negative and difficult, robbing her of the kind of love and regard she so obviously deserved. From what you see of her life the movie represented this well. Certainly what I know of this...it was well made. I watched as Beatrix begins at thirty to get a book to print, to see her wider world, she begins to want to make her own way too, to connect to her publisher who would ultimately love her and want to marry her. As she turns her work into books,she guides the process with her concerns for low prices and high quality, and Warnes'(publisher) obvious regard for her work is exposed, the love story unfolds. He does care about her work. This I think takes her breath, who has shown her this before? It is something she has not fathomed as she considers his offer of marriage-she who has come to terms with the other reality -you feel the charge through her entire being-the risk-the true hope. It is remarkable she defies the norms for women of her times, remarkable she created books still in print today for children, remarkable that her tender drawings spoke to her loved one as something as important to him as she was. It is definitely a very touching movie portrayal of how they grew to love one another based on in part a mutual regard for her work. And when he is taken from her, by illness, as she is living away for a summer respecting her parents wishes that they serve this time to prove a real affection-the parents opposing the impossibility of their marrying due to the differences in social status..as the movie portrays the crush of her losing this love, her love for his sister saves her.
Her break with her family really results. She takes what is now her fortune and stands on her own feet. She has to. And her art and this closeness to nature and to this language of creating as her "place" to carry her forward through this pain of losing this love that had transformed her, all I did was cry.

So for the last half of the movie I was a teary public mess as she went forward to make more stories for books one a tender homage to her love. She went on to buy her Hill Top farm, expand it buying nearby lands, and finally make it into the wild, unruined and un developed National Treasure that was bestowed to the English. And then she loved again. Beatrix is portrayed as I think of her, someone delighted with life, someone easy to admire and love, someone completely surprised perhaps by the wonder of living.
And thinking of the movie today brought back my tears, the land looking like where I grew up, my Dad's farm, my kind of life that was lived in happy places making my drawings of flowers, animals, birds...it was a very lovely film to encounter in the air, unsure not having traveled in a long while and having a hope alive in my heart.

It made me cry as a love story might.I recommend the film. I look forward to seeing it again and I have decided to return from spring break and share the Peter Rabbit story with my class. As tender and as whimsical as it is, I know they will love it.I can think of no point of criticism of what I watched. For me, an artist and person so closely tied to children, this movie was just wonderful. The shy tenderness of the love story so representative of my relationships to love.